


Meet the Basic Need in Me

by vargrimar



Series: The Chambers and the Valves [18]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Apologies, Autistic Sherlock Holmes, Canon Compliant, Episode: s04e02 The Lying Detective, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Missing Scene, Past Violence, Pining, Pre-Relationship, Reconciliation, Season/Series 04, Survivor Guilt, but at least there's cake?, cake doesn't exactly make everything better but it helps, no one's having a good time here, this is some heavy stuff, where there's cake there's apology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22946245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vargrimar/pseuds/vargrimar
Summary: Sherlock brings his left hand into the front fold of his coat. His fingers brush the placket of his shirt, whispering up his sternum to the small bisected crater notched between his ribs. He presses there, gently, memories eddying amidst the friction.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Series: The Chambers and the Valves [18]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1640680
Comments: 3
Kudos: 48





	Meet the Basic Need in Me

**Author's Note:**

> ( and even at my best  
> I give in to console  
> the empty feeling in my chest )

“I… I’m sorry, you know.”

Sherlock glances up from his generous slice of chocolate cake. “For?”

“For the mortuary. At Culverton’s hospital. For… well. For beating the hell out of you.”

John entertains a tight frown, picking at spongy lemon drizzle with the tines of his fork. His head of silver-wheat is a little mussed from the wind and his eyes still have a slight reddened appearance, but a touch of dishevelment has never detracted from his charm. John could be in muddy jeans with sweat-sticky hair and a criminal’s blood stained down his shirtfront and he’d be no less handsome than he would be groomed and pressed and clad in a well-tailored suit.

Perhaps it’s the change of environment, but in the soft, warm light of the cake shop and all its dessert-themed decorations and sugar-infused confections, he seems… better. Livelier. As if this John were an entirely separate entity from the shivery, quaking thing Sherlock had enfolded in his arms at Baker Street.

Because not twenty minutes ago, John had broken down in the middle of Sherlock’s sitting room. His indefectible posture had grown crooked and hunched in his confession’s wake, left hand plastered across his face in shame to hide the tears from Mary’s ghost. His solid shoulders had given way to infinitesimal earthquakes and his voice had become a brittle, splintering artefact in the fissure of his chest.

And Sherlock, presented with yet another facet of John he had never seen, had stood from his chair, crossed the room, and done what felt right.

Sherlock scrapes off a bit of icing and tries not to dwell.

_It is what it is._

His inner palm still feels scorched.

“It was—Christ, it was monstrous of me,” John continues, storm-wrought eyes focussed on his plate. “Doing what I did. Going beyond. Getting so—so _angry_. I know now some of it must’ve been acting on your part because of the DVD. Because of what Mary said. Her telling you to go straight into hell, to endanger yourself for my benefit. It was, wasn’t it? Acting. At least a little. Minus the double kidney failure and all that because—well. You know. But that doesn’t—that doesn’t excuse it. The punches. Kicking you in the stomach. Beating you bloody. It doesn’t excuse it. It doesn’t at all.”

“It’s all fine, John,” says Sherlock, because he doesn’t know what else to say. “Not the first time you’ve given me a well-deserved bruising, and I doubt it will be the last.”

“No, it is the last.” John’s grip on his fork tightens. His voice is low, controlled, Captain Watson shining through. “It is. It needs to be. I don’t—I don’t want to do that again. Okay? I don’t want to be the one giving you a black eye or a bloody nose or bruised ribs. I don’t. That’s not something friends do. You can say it’s all fine, but it’s not. What I did was not fine. It will never be fine. I should be—God, if anyone ever had you on the floor like that, I’d be throttling them. But instead I’m the one who put you there.”

“John,” says Sherlock, and he doesn’t quite know why he’s saying his name. He doesn’t have words to accompany the thoughts flurrying about his headspace. Something pangs in his chest.

“No, I mean it,” says John. “Really, I do. And this is…” He waves his fork, as if it might help grasp for words. “God, I don’t know. Bad. Rough. Difficult.”

“Shit,” Sherlock helpfully supplies.

“Shit,” John agrees. “Yeah. Yeah, that about sums it up.”

Sherlock nods and gives the chocolate a good stab. “Right. Well, you don’t need to apologise. I understand the position I put you in. Things are, as previously mentioned, shit, so I think it can be safely assumed that your reaction was well within expectations. I don’t fault you for it.” He pops a piece into his mouth. Just as expected: saliva-producingly saccharine. “Not every day your former flatmate goes on a bender and tries to kill himself, hm?”

John makes a snorting sort of laugh. “No, not every day. Just a couple times a year.”

“Quite right. Same time next year, then?” Sherlock thumbs the buttercream from the side of his mouth and tries for a smile.

“Yeah.” John mirrors it, and it’s fond. Tired, but fond. “Yeah, same time next year. Maybe try to leave the drugs out of it, though. Draws it out.”

“Mm. I’ll take it into consideration. Can’t make any promises. Schedules, you know. Never know when a good death will suit.”

“Right. Of course. I’m sure it’ll fool the next criminal mastermind who wants to off you. Can’t rightly kill you if you do it first.” John cuts off a piece with the side of his fork and eats it. “Though I’d appreciate you letting on if you’re anticipating any more fake deaths in the near future. You know. In case you’d care to spare us a bit of grief.”

Sherlock frowns. “Sorry, have we strayed from the joking? I thought this was turning out to be a rather good-natured exchange.”

“Yeah, well. You dying seems to be a sore spot.” He offers a casual shrug. “Can’t imagine why.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Hm. Interesting.” Sherlock runs a thoughtful finger along the tender stitches at his left eyebrow. “Well, I have it on good authority that things do get a bit sore from time to time. Very unfortunate and completely unavoidable, or so I’m told. Comes with the territory. Has a little something to do with being human.”

John opens his mouth to reply, but the cake shop’s door chimes and his attention snaps over to witness their third party’s arrival.

Mousy hair pulled into a dishevelled bun, Molly nudges in with her handbag hooked over her shoulder, thin grey cardigan unbuttoned at the throat. She smiles at John and then at Sherlock—and it changes there, he notes, lessening, shaping with what might be concern—before she weaves her way round the other tables to where they have sequestered themselves in the very corner.

“Sorry I’m late,” she says. “Traffic, you know. Got a bit congested. I would have left earlier, but—”

“It’s fine,” says Sherlock. “Cake?”

Molly glances at their respective plates before appraising the display cases. “Um, yeah, actually. Have they got any carrot?”

“Undoubtedly,” he says. “One of the more popular flavours. Cream cheese filling. Though if you’d prefer something a little more adventurous, they’ve got a ginger spice cake that sells quite well.”

She regards him with bewildered interest. “I thought you haven’t been here before.”

“I haven’t.”

“He read that off a menu,” says John.

“The filling part, yes. I’ve no way of knowing exactly what ingredients go in otherwise. The popularity of ginger spice, however, can be inferred from the placement of the cake in the primary case as well as the distinct presence of its advertisement on the shop windows compared to the other flavours.” Sherlock brings another wedge of chocolate to his lips. “Obvious, really.”

“Right. Obvious.” John makes an amused noise as he scoops up another healthy portion of his slice. “Well, cake or no, this is what you’ve got to look forward to for the next four hours. Make sure he eats something other than sugar, yeah?”

Molly simpers. “I can try. He just drinks tea with me, mostly.”

“Hm. Tea’s better than nothing, I suppose.”

“He did have a bit of toast last time.”

“Did he?” John swallows the bite, tongue swiping at the corner of his mouth to lick a crumb away. “Well, that’s progress. Very good. Maybe he’ll stomach a sandwich next.”

“I _am_ right here, you know,” says Sherlock, staring pointedly at his cake and not at John or his mouth. “Are these inane reports really necessary?”

“Yes, they are, because we know you. If we leave you to your own devices, you’ll either embellish the truth or avoid telling it at all. It won’t kill you to be excluded from the conversation for two seconds.” John nods at Molly and passes her a tenner from his wallet. “Go on. Get your carrot cake. I’ll be here a moment longer. Still need to finish.”

As Molly wanders over to the cake displays and engages the clerk, Sherlock pokes at his dessert and chances another look at John—John in his dark jacket, John in his worn denims. He wears a neutral expression and a small half-smile as he eats, but that same sort of tiredness pulls at his edges, weathering crags across his face and eroding the mountains of his shoulders.

It isn’t as severe as before. Sherlock knows that for certain. When it had attempted to deform John into rubble at Baker Street, the weight of it appeared nigh overwhelming. There were tiny little fractures and rifts at John’s seams, unnoticeable to those who wouldn’t know how or where to look.

But right now, in this particular moment from where Sherlock sits by John in a quaint cake place in central London, they’ve lessened. They aren’t gone (and evidence suggests they never will be), but they’re less, and that is good.

Perhaps that shattering is what John needed. A relief in the pressure. A shift in the earth. A fold in the tectonics. Sherlock may be a master of masks, but John has his own sort of practised stoicism that conceals the _more_ that always pushes and presses down underneath: stress and strain, joints and faults, plate boundaries, orogenesis. Tamping it all down with no outlet is sure to cause some kind of cataclysm (Sherlock knows; he has learnt this more than once), and that cataclysm just so happened to occur at 221B Baker Street, leaving a quiet, shaking John in its aftermath.

Grief, Sherlock thinks, must be such a heavy thing.

He can’t fathom it. There are few events which might make him grieve, and he has experienced none of them. The one he would feel most keenly would be a permanent absence of John, and the thought of John not existing isn’t something with which he can come to terms. It’s implausible, impossible, an undefined concept; it’s division by zero. John exists now, has existed for four decades, and will continue to exist for decades to come. John has become a fixed point in his life, an anchor, something he can count on to keep himself in check, and he doesn’t know what would happen if that point were to simply stop being.

A lot would happen, he imagines. Or perhaps nothing at all. Either he would grieve as John currently grieves with fits of recalcitrant rage and tremoring sorrow, or the rest of the colour in the world would bleed away into a bleak chiaroscuro.

After all, the thirty-some years of Sherlock’s life Before John seem washed out and blanched, as if someone had somehow wrung their colours from them and applied a grainy monochromatic filter in their place. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that such a state of being would continue, dull and moribund in its persistence. As it is, his states of being have already been reduced to Before John and After John, and to think that there might be an After-After John state somewhere in the future is a very tenebrous train of thought.

Sherlock dismisses it with difficulty, wrestling it into a box before shoving it into a mind palace broom cupboard and shutting the door. Now is After John, he reminds himself; not After-After John.

Because as cross and grief-ridden as John had been, he’d still recognised Sherlock’s clues and sought him out at Culverton Smith’s hospital, and that is significant. John is here—tired and grieving, but still here—which means that despite the exhaustion and the anger and the grief and the total life upheaval, John still considers himself his friend. The ground might be uneven and the footing might be tentative for fear of further tremors, but John is still his friend. That is all that matters.

He watches as John sections off another bit of lemon sponge with his fork. It’s methodical, the way he does it, working from soft yellow centre to glossy-white glaze. It aligns with many of his other predictable yet charming behaviours, and it makes Sherlock think of simpler days, the ones long before the threads of Moriarty’s influence fully came together: a serial killing cabbie, an international smuggling ring, hallucinations in Dartmoor.

An uncomfortable stitch of affection sews itself between the spaces of his ribs. If the light catches John just right, Sherlock thinks he can glimpse the John of five years ago. It’s a bit difficult, like he’s looking through a prism with endless facets composing an irregular shape. The angle is wrong and the light source lacks proper candescence and John is ever the delicate subject, but when the world tilts just so, the earth beneath shifting into perfect balance, the disparate, fractured shards of John just… _catch_.

And then he is five years younger. Five years more naïve. He is the returned soldier with the bad shoulder and the psychosomatic limp who dreams of arid deserts and staccato gunfire. He is the selfless doctor with a good heart who is willing to sacrifice himself for King (Queen?) and country and almost does in the deafening din of combat. He is John Hamish Watson, the obstinate man with a taste for adrenaline who will become his flatmate for the next year and a half and who will steal his heart in the process.

It lasts for barely a moment before the axis shifts. And when it does, the John of present day sits before him once more with silver in his hair and lemon on his fork.

“Behave for Molly,” he says, gesturing with the last icing-covered piece in what Sherlock assumes is meant to be a threatening manner. “She’s doing you a favour because she cares about you. So don’t be—you know. Overly obnoxious. Keep the demeaning comments to a minimum.”

Sherlock puffs a sigh. “I’m quite capable, John. No need for last minute lectures.”

“Right. Okay. Good.” John nods and downs it in one bite before gathering up his plate. “Well, I’m off. The minder’s probably wondering why I’m so bloody late. I’ll see you at six tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah. Of course. Six tomorrow.” Sherlock straightens in his seat, offering the start of a smile. “Say hello to Rosie for me, will you?”

A faint crinkle of amusement flanks John’s eyes. “Will do.”

As John leaves his plate with the other dishes by the bin and crosses the shop to leave, Sherlock follows his movements along his periphery. He catalogues the length of John’s strides, the way John holds himself, the receding tension in his body. The exhaustion is evident, but still nothing compared to how it had been at Baker Street.

With luck, the hairline cracks through his seams will continue to lessen and mend (because these are John’s scars, he realises; there must be time and the emotional equivalent of aloe vera), and the guilt and grief will start to ease. There might be a time in the near future where their silence might grow companionable once more, and Sherlock finds himself wondering how long such a process might take. It’s true that their friendship once survived the test of Sherlock’s death and has now survived the test of Mary’s, but that does not mean John is without resentment or heartache.

Sherlock brings his left hand into the front fold of his coat. His fingers brush the placket of his shirt, whispering up his sternum to the small bisected crater notched between his ribs. He presses there, gently, memories eddying amidst the friction.

I’ve done as you asked, Mary, he thinks. I brought myself to the very brink and John pulled me back. He saved me, just like always, but I don’t think it’s enough. He misses you. Madly. What more can I do?

Molly sits down beside him with her carrot cake, sporting a timid yet genuine smile. “So, how are you, then? All right?”

Sherlock spears a piece of chocolate and brings it to his mouth. The pleasant shock of sugar zips in an electric zing on his tongue. He watches John’s familiar figure dip through the shop door, sunshine gilding the silver glints in his hair. He watches until the last bit of John’s coat disappears beyond the window and out of sight.

_Trust me, Sherlock, it’s gone before you know it._

“I’ve been better,” he replies, and traces the striation across his scar.


End file.
